Key Point: Check your personal Facebook profile, and you’ll find four categories no longer exist: your employer, your job title, your education, and your field of study. Facebook pulled those options, saying “As people fill in their education or employer on their profile, we have found a small percentage of people who have entered offensive responses, in violation of our policies.”

Not only did you lose your ability to designate those personal distinctions, advertisers can no longer use them for ad targeting. For some businesses, that’s a significant loss, but Facebook is looking for a work-around. The Facebook newsroom update said, “To help ensure that targeting is not used for discriminatory purposes, we are removing these self-reported targeting fields until we have the right processes in place to help prevent this issue.”

For now, though, you’ll find another way to reach custom audiences you could earlier reach via targeting jobs and schools.

Key Point: Android users now have the ability to ask questions about a business via the Google Business listing. Business owners should be sure to claim their Google My Business listing and install the Google Maps app to manage the feature for their company.

The rollout is called “Ask a question.” To see it in action, use an Android smartphone to search for the name of a local business (using either Maps or your Chrome browser). Just below the hours, and above the reviews, you should see a “Questions and answers” box. Anyone can ask a question and anyone can answer a question. Do you see why it’s important for the business to use Map settings to get notified when there’s “Questions and answers” activity?

Key Point: If you’re not getting ready for the holidays yet, better get on it. To help you tune up your email-marketing aptitude, Constant Contact prepared a special report on how to write holiday emails effectively. Even if you’re an email master, going back over the basics regularly helps keep you sharp.

Key Point: Some months, it seems like all the news is “Facebook did this” and “Facebook launched that.” Over the past several years, the platform’s targeting options have kept ad teams giddy with possibility. Digiday, though, says Facebook is ‘losing attention’ and publishers are ‘shifting focus to other platforms.’

Key Point: Google says viewers are 300% more likely to pay attention to a video ad than they are to watch a TV ad. Not only that, but they’re twice as likely to stay tuned-in to a YouTube ad than to a social media ad. Why? Because YouTubers are there to watch video, not to chat with friends. To help advertisers capitalize on that audience, the Big G announced four new tools:

Custom Affinity Audiences: to help you reach a more relevant audience

Director Mix: to simplify the process of tweaking creatives to the audience

Video Ad Sequencing: to help you build an unfolding story that reacts to the viewer’s preferences

Matched Panel Analysis: This Nielsen-based approach to measuring sales will help you match ads to sales.

Key Point: Speaking of Google and the holidays, Google announced new Merchant Center tools to help you shore up product data. For instance, you’re not limited to a single feed now, Google rolled out supplemental feeds that will let you submit and modify your product data from multiple sources.

Key Point: We covered the beta testing and the release, now it’s time to talk about the updates. If you’ve not yet checked out Google Data Studio, there’s no time like the present. It is one powerful tool. It’s FREE, and it’s available around everywhere.

The newest addition, just announced, is Data Studio Community Connections. You can now visualize data pulled from any source you choose. You can also embed those reports (fully-interactive) on your own website.